Go Ahead: Search my brain

I feel so much like the silence of the lambs

Silence of the ;lambs is by far one of my favorite movies ever. It is at the foundation of who I am today. I will not explain this further but it is true. Did you know that it is only the third in history to win Oscars in all the top five categories: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Silence of the Lambs has always stayed with me and at least once every few weeks I end up quoting it. I love stating It puts the lotion in the basket.

If you don’t know that quote, look it up. Its eerie and funny. Well, it is funny when you state it in a business meeting. Am I showing my New York colors and sense of humor. This may be why people in San Francisco didn’t quite get me. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has a slightly different sense of humor than northern California. They laugh, although with a bit of fear, at my Silence of the Lambs jokes. Did you know that the director Jonathan Demme said he released the movie on Valentine’s Day 1991 because he thought it would be a great date movie? Anyone who has seen it would know that is a twisted date night move to make. A serial killer is not the most romantic type of film to go out to on a first date. But, who needs romantic Meg Ryan films anyway? I certainly do not.

In the movie, Clarice Sterling goes repeatedly to Hannibal Lecter’s storage unit to look for clues. I was always creeped by the concept of storage units. To me, it is where you go to drop off the rolled up bodies. Despite being a New Yorker, I have never needed to rent a storage unit. Yes, New York apartments are about 250 square feet but I never had much. Thus, I was not like many other New Yorkers that I knew that had at least one, and at times two, storage units. Besides dead bodies, I always wondered what one kept in a storage unit. I imagined keeping voodoo dolls and old military documents proving what really happened at that Roswell. Basically, storage units are keepers of the nefarious.

Now many years after I first saw Silence of the Lambs, I have moved to Los Angeles, and for the first time ever I had to rent a storage unit. I have reached the point in my life where my possessions or junk outpace my living quarters space. This just boggles my mind. How in the world did I get to this point? I have been discarding items. However, I have also been accumulating and saving random things. I am sure my 200 plus shoe collection doesn’t help. And of course, none of my shoes are in storage. I have my Christmas ornaments, alongside, old bills, alongside, boxes of my son’s baby clothes. I can’t get myself to get rid of them yet I can’t keep them with me everyday. What is the point of me saving these things if I can’t look at them on a daily basis?

I now have a storage unit. I have become a New Yorker by living in Los Angeles. I now can reenact scenes from Silence of the Lambs but first let me get a bottle of chianti.

Don’t forget the fava beans. And make sure the Chianti is nice – if it’s not nice, you should kill it. Or maybe kill it, anyway.

It’s a good date night movie if it makes your guy feel all protective or causes your girl to burrow into the crook of your arm (or, vice versa – wouldn’t want to seem sexist here, and it could totally go the other way). It’s a BAD date night movie if it gives either party a serious craving for sweetbreads, fava beans, and Chianti.

The book this movie is based on is a huge favorite, and I loved the film as well, though that final scene in the basement when Clarice is being stalked in pitch blackness, while Gumb sees her with night vision goggles, scared me so badly I had to go sleep at my grandmother’s house that night. Keep an eye on my blog post tomorrow – you might be pleasantly surprised. 🙂 Excellent post, by the way. I really enjoy your writing and slightly skewed vision of the world.

A few years after Silence came out, I met a guy in Denver, Colorado, who became a brief hiking buddy. He did his best to woo me but I wasn’t having any of it, there were just too many red flags. Not the least of which was that in the dirt floor sub-basement of his older home, there was an actual rock well just like in Silence of the Lambs. It was the same size, the same depth, the same kind of rock bricks, everything.

He said he didn’t build it or anything, that it came with the house, and the tree roots growing out from between some of the bricks and trailing down more or less confirmed his claims but I got rid of him, anyway. Serial killers are spooky but staunch Republicans with Mad Men leanings are fucking terrifying.

“I now have a storage unit. I have become a New Yorker by living in Los Angeles.” And here I’d always thought that SF more closely emulated NY than LA. Whatever it took, I’m happy to hear you prefer your most recent hometown than the one immediately previous, as it is also my hometown, if only by being the largest city near Torrance that everybody recognizes.
I remember Silence of the Lambs as the film that was showing in Westwood (THE place for movie premieres in the late 20th century) as Spouse and I emerged from a Beverly Hills lab/doctor’s office where I’d just undergone Chorionic villus sampling (CVS), a form of prenatal diagnosis to determine chromosomal or genetic disorders in the fetus, because I was then at the “advanced maternal age” of 35. This was my second pregnancy and, since my parents were tending our older child so we could enjoy our usual Friday date night, this was the film we chose to see. Maybe that explains why this second child carried the moniker “The Devil Child” during her earliest years, including her birth, which was the only easy part of those years, though it occurred at 2:13AM on a Friday morning, a day I recall easily since we’d left for the hospital after viewing “L.A. Law”, a favorite Thursday night TB show.
Fortunately, as I’d expected, test results were negative. She’d been devilish before birth since she only moved when NOT on the fetal monitor, and gave me a lot of heartburn during that pregnancy, too! I can happily say that we all survived that “Devil Child” period and now, at 24, she demonstrates her devilish ways mainly on just her boyfriend!